Reese Witherspoon wanted to say no when Lorne Michaels asked her to host the first Saturday Night Live after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. “I really need you to show up. I really, really need this,” she remembers Michaels pleading. “Rudy Giuliani is going to be here. All the firefighters are going to be here. Paul Simon is going to sing, I just need you to come out and do something a little light and tell America that we got to laugh again. We’ve got to get back the national spirit.”
Witherspoon said yes, but the experience was overwhelming, she told Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast. Thanks to anxiety, she “completely left my body… It’s not the show’s fault,” she said. “It was just too much responsibility for a 24-year-old girl.”
“Zero stars,” she concluded. “Do not recommend.”
While many stars have a blast appearing on SNL, Witherspoon is far from alone in her “zero stars” review. Here are 4 more celebrities who had a terrible time hosting the show.
Elon Musk
Who needs Emmy Award-winning writers? When Musk hosted in 2021, he and his posse arrived with sketch ideas ready to go. His big swing was to do a monologue in which he’d promise to take his cock out, then unzip his pants to reveal a baby rooster. Get it? Wait, it gets better. Then Kate McKinnon would join him on stage, holding a cat, all so Musk could stroke her pussy.
Musk was miffed when no one laughed at his killer bit. “I was like, is this thing working? Are we muted?”
“We hear you,” replied the despondent SNL writers.
Patrick Stewart
Hosting SNL “should have been one of my crowning achievements, as it is for many of the actors, comics and athletes who get to host the show,” Stewart wrote in his memoir, Making It So. “But I wasn’t as loose then as I am now, and I found the whole experience incredibly stressful. My opening monologue was one of the more awful ones in the history of the show, full of lame Star Trek jokes that I failed to land, and I just didn’t connect with SNL’s cast, as talented as they were.”
Louise Lasser
Lasser was crumbling under the pressures of her new fame when she hosted in 1976, and she took it out on the cast of SNL. She refused to do sketches that were written for her, according to Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. Twenty minutes before the show began, she locked herself in her dressing room and refused to go on. (The cast was happy to divide up her parts among themselves until Lasser changed her mind.) She ended the show with a rambling monologue about her unhappiness. Michael O’Donoghue walked off the show that week, calling Lasser “clinically berserk.”
William Shatner
Robert Smigel was thrilled at Shatner getting big laughs during his Star Trek convention sketch in 1986, according to Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. But Shatner was less enthusiastic about his experience.
First, why make him arrive on Monday when sketches weren’t going to be written until Tuesday night? Then it’s Wednesday, “and some people come in and they’ve written some notes on a napkin,” he told the Television Academy Foundation. “Now it’s Thursday and I’m saying, ‘We are going on the air on Saturday, right? And there’s nothing written!’”
Shatner couldn’t believe he was supposed to look at cue cards instead of the other comics. “You do this show that’s almost ad lib, but it’s not because you’re reading,” he sighed. “Really weird. It’s a weird show.”
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